Red Hat Launches Enterprise Linux 6.4, Big Data Focus

Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and also established its big data strategy.

Red Hat has announced general availability of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4.
With this release RHEL has been optimized for performance, stability and flexibility, and designed to help organizations manage their workloads across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux introduces several new components that help enterprises meet core business objectives, including support for the parallel Network File System (pNFS), enhanced interoperability and more.
Red Hat has collaborated with its partners and the community on the pNFS industry standard. This helps to solve the problems associated with NFS sprawl, characterized by the explosive growth of data and the increased burden of managing file system complexity, the company said. Capabilities have also been added that result in performance gains for I/O intensive workloads like database access. Using the new pNFS client -- delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 -- customers can begin to plan and design next-generation, scalable file system solutions based on pNFS.
“NetApp and Red Hat are seeing considerable demand for pNFS capabilities from customers looking to modernize their data center environment to address the extreme requirements around scale, performance and manageability,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions and integrations at NetApp, in a statement. “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Red Hat has achieved a significant milestone advancing pNFS client support, which reflects their continued leadership and innovation in enterprise-class open source solutions.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 continues to expand security through enhanced identity and host-based access management. This release also provides easier interoperability in heterogeneous environments, whether identities are Linux- based or managed by Microsoft Active Directory, the company said.

RHEL 6 .4 also includes Microsoft Hyper-V Linux drivers, improving the overall performance of the operating system when running as a guest on Microsoft Hyper-V. The latest release also offers installation support for the VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V para-virtualized drivers, improving the deployment experience for users working in these environments.
In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 provides enhancement to control groups (cgroups), allowing multi-threaded applications to migrate smoothly between them. And this release includes updated performance monitoring tools that support new counters -- performance monitoring units, or PMUs -- from Intel.
Moreover, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 includes several key productivity-focused improvements, including enhanced interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, calendar support in Evolution, and new functions, such as alarm notifications and the ability to schedule meetings. This update also includes support for newer Wacom tablets, which benefits professional animators and design artists.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux has long been considered the premier open source operating system for enterprises, and this latest iteration further cements the platform as a compelling foundation for mission-critical solutions across physical, virtual and cloud environments," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's Platform Business Unit, in a statement. "The features found within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 — from support for pNFS to expanded security features and much more — exemplify our commitment to innovation and providing our customers with the advanced tools they need to attain their business goals."
Meanwhile, Red Hat also recently announced its big data direction and solutions for enterprises looking for reliable, scalable, and manageable solutions to effectively run their big data analytics workloads. The company also announced it is contributing its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments. Red Hat also said it is building a network of ecosystem and enterprise integration partners to deliver big data solutions to enterprise customers.
Red Hat said it intends to make its Hadoop plug-in for Red Hat Storage available to the Hadoop community later this year. Currently in technology preview, the Red Hat Storage Apache Hadoop plug-in provides a new storage option for enterprise Hadoop deployments that delivers enterprise storage features while maintaining API compatibility and local data access. Red Hat Storage brings enterprise-class features to big data environments, such as Geo replication, high availability, POSIX compliance, disaster recovery and management. This solution provides users with a unified data and scale out storage software platform to accommodate files and objects deployed across physical, virtual, public and hybrid cloud resources.